Aligning BI With Corporate Strategy: A Tactical Perspective
(Originally published by TDWI) By Maureen Clarry
(This article is available for download, as a PDF document.)
Aligning your company’s business intelligence initiatives with overall corporate strategy makes complete sense. Few would argue against such an intuitive approach, especially as articulated by Robert Kaplan, father of the proverbial Balanced Scorecard. Yet a quick review of the real world reminds us how often we defy such thoughtful strategy and instead play things by ear.
An analysis of why this happens would reveal any number of reasons, ranging from laziness to hesitancy, style to methodology, competition to extenuating circumstances. What matters most in a business context, however, is not so much why we stray from our strategies, but rather which best practices should be employed to help us stay on track.
So the big question is: How? To begin the answering process, talk to your IT colleagues about their goals, and about the long-term results they’re trying to achieve for the company. We’ve found that IT people have difficulty thinking in terms of corporate strategy. There’s a lot of “doing” going on, but people don’t talk in terms of results. They’re not clear about the results they’re trying to create. And that’s a real dilemma for IT, because frequently they don’t understand the business the way front-line managers or senior executives do.
But it’s not entirely their fault. If business management can’t articulate the results they want to achieve, how can employees be expected to deliver? With that in mind, think about the processes in place at your organization for facilitating communication between the BI team and other departments. How do people communicate? Is communication clear? Is documentation available and easily understood? Is it results-oriented? Who reads it?
Asking these types of questions at staff meetings and in the hallways will help ensure that your company’s BI strategy is at least top-of-mind. The process of analysis itself adds value by fostering an innovative corporate culture. For some more tactical ideas, consider the following:
Favor Your Prophets
An ancient proverb teaches that prophets are respected everywhere except in their homeland. Senior executives in corporate America are quick to look outside their organization for ideas on how to improve operations. While industry best practices are valuable and often applicable, keep in mind that your company surely has employees who are exceptional, and whose acumen would best be shared with others.
Think in terms of a standard bell curve: there are a small percentage of low performers, a majority of moderate performers, and a small percentage of high performers. Check out the top performers in your own company. What are they doing that’s unique or remarkable? What’s their approach? Are they using different data? Which tools do they use? Do they have undocumented “work-arounds” that contribute to their success? How might a BI solution support the business result for which these employees are accountable? Examine their best practices and then determine how to operationalize their approach with others. Evangelize their understanding and appreciation of corporate strategy, one employee at a time if necessary.
Knowing where to focus efforts is crucial. A common mistake is to work especially hard on improving the weakest performers in the company, the low end of the bell curve. This results in disproportionate amounts of time, energy and resources being expended on a small subset of employees, with minimal positive impact on the company.
Instead, focus on moving the middle of the curve toward exemplary performance. Don’t waste time on those who won’t learn or prove to be chronic underachievers. Rather, learn from the top performers and share their best practices with those in the middle so you can shift the majority in the right direction. Getting most employees to improve incrementally will yield a much more positive impact overall than getting a handful of workers to improve substantially. Simply put, the more people who understand and embrace your corporate strategy, the more aligned it will become with your IT initiatives.
The ‘Right’ Person?
In a recent management role-playing seminar, two volunteers agreed to become paper-cup makers. Each person was given an envelope with instructions, and then encouraged by managers to make as many cups as possible. After a few minutes of discrete training, everyone but the cup-makers left the room. When we returned, one person had finished 20 cups, the other only two. A discussion about why this happened resulted in two theories: 1) the slower person was simply wrong for the job; 2) the slower person didn’t have the right skills and needed better training. Only after additional discussion did someone finally figure out that the two cup-makers had been given completely different instructions.
There is a tendency in business to forget about the importance of environment and motivation. Performance problems are invariably attributed to the two aforementioned reasons: wrong person or insufficient training. In reality, you can have the right person with the proper training, and still get bad results because of environmental issues (culture, business processes, work atmosphere, information, technology), or wrong motivation (incentives, consequences, feedback).
Everything must be right if you want to ensure the right results. This holds true for business roles as well as BI team roles. Ask yourself: Do you have the right processes, technology, data? Does all of that map to your corporate strategy? Can you verify that? Who needs to know about certain issues? Are the right people involved? And are the right motivations in place? One weak link and the chain quickly falls apart.
Focus on Results
When we ask BI people to describe their role in the company, and specifically to explain their value-add overall, invariably they start talking about what they do. So people are definitely doing things, but there’s not enough understanding of the value that’s created at the end of the day. When you press people about the value of their BI solution, they say it provides better information. So what? What’s the business result that can be achieved due to the improved information? Reduced costs, increased revenues, shorter time to market? Increased market share, customer retention, call center efficiency? Stay focused on the business benefit: That’s the missing link.
Maureen Clarry is CEO / Co-Founder of CONNECT: The Knowledge Network, a firm specializing in IT workforce effectiveness solutions. Maureen is on the faculty of TDWI and teaches regularly on leadership issues related to data warehousing.